All of this will become clearer if you read, or read in, Ptolemy’s Almagest. Something else will become clear as well, and that is the enormous complexity and difficulty of the astronomical work done by Ptolemy—and by his predecessors, to whose observations and theories he constantly refers. He obviously considered himself but the latest in a long series of patient laborers in the vineyard of astronomy. Perhaps he was, after all, the greatest such laborer so far, but there would be even greater ones after him, he knew. That too is a noble idea, and at the very heart of science.
I had a philosopher friend who used to speak of what he called “The Great Academy.” There were only seven members of this august group: three poets, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; three philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas; and one scientist, Ptolemy. Ptolemy belonged, my friend said, because, more than any other scientist who ever lived, he had a clear conception of the fundamental task of science, which is to explain everything and to include everything in one great system. With no exceptions.
Exceptions in science do not prove the rule, they spoil the theory. If Galileo had never built a telescope, we might still believe in Ptolemy’s system of the world. And we might be better off; but then again, maybe not.
BOETHIUS
480?–524
The Consolation of Philosophy
This is a book that only a hard heart can read without shedding a tear.
Boethius was born toward the end of the fifth century, when the Roman Empire in the West was falling apart. The emperors were brutal savages, and the institutions that survived were mere vestiges of the system of law and government that had made Rome great. Ignorance was everywhere, in high places and in low, and it was not hard for anyone with half an eye to see that a long dark age was coming, perhaps to endure forevermore.
Boethius had more than half an eye. A member of an old, distinguished Roman family, he received an excellent classical education and set himself, while still a young man, to translate and adapt the Greek works of philosophy into Latin so they might survive in some form, even if civilization did not. He translated Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s logical treatises, and then began to translate the Organon—the collective name of these treatises—itself. He may have completed the work but only parts of it are extant. Nevertheless, they were the only versions that could be read by monks and scholars in the West for more than eight hundred years.
Boethius’s father had served as consul and now Boethius came to the notice of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, who had usurped the imperial rule. Boethius became consul in his turn and a few years later was named by Theodoric magister officiorum, or head of all government and court services. As such Boethius was one of the most important men in the Roman world.
If you serve a despot, however, you are important only so long as you continue to please. Boethius ceased to please Theodoric some time around CE 522. He was accused of treason on grounds that are unintelligible to us now, and of practicing magic or sorcery, a charge he strenuously denied. He was tried, convicted, and imprisoned, probably in Pavia, to await his execution.
The wait was long, perhaps as much as two years. Boethius was continuously tortured to remind him of how far he had fallen from the grace of his lord. But he had extraordinary strength of heart and will, and he wrote a book, The Consolation of Philosophy. Whether the manuscript was spirited out of his cell before or after his execution we do not know; at any rate it survived and became the most widely read book during the early Middle Ages, after the Holy Scriptures as translated into Latin by Saint Jerome.
In the book Boethius makes little mention of the torments he suffered: it is enough to say that he has once been a great man and is now in prison, awaiting death. As he lies on his narrow bed in his dark cell a beautiful lady appears to him, dressed all in white, with radiance in her hair: this lady is Philosophy, and she speaks to him and soothes his pain. She reminds him that the true Good is not any earthly thing but is instead the being of all good things, existing in that higher and better world to which he perforce will go. Fortune and misfortune, she tells him, are subordinate to a greater Providence, a summum bonum (greatest good) that “strongly and sweetly” rules the universe. There is no real evil, and virtue is always finally rewarded. Boethius, the suffering prisoner, thus consoled by the hope of reparation and reward after his death, is able to die in peace.
Boethius’s family had been Christian for a century before his birth and he was almost certainly a Christian himself. Nevertheless, the Consolation contains little or no hint of Christianity. Instead the work, with its Platonic insistence on the real existence of such ideal forms as Being, Truth, and Good, is a kind of pagan version of a Christian tract. It possesses a clear, cool eloquence that is rare in such works, and all the rarer considering the hideous circumstances under which it was written.
AUGUSTINE
354–430
Confessions
Augustine’s Confessions is not only the first real autobiography in the history of literature, it is also one of the best. Maybe it is the best. It is astonishing how often the first example or examples of a genre turn out to be the best examples. Don Quixote may be the first novel, and few novels compare to it. The Iliad and The Odyssey are the first epics, and no subsequent works in that genre have surpassed them. No tragedy has surpassed Aeschylus’s Oresteia; if the tragedies of Shakespeare are equal to the Oresteia they are so different as almost to constitute a new genre—in which they, in turn, are unsurpassed.
The question is not, however, whether the first examples of a genre are relatively so good, but why they are. Is innovation sufficient by itself to guarantee excellence? Certainly not. Are the greatest artists naturally drawn to the creation of new forms? Perhaps, although some great artists have been followers rather than leaders, inspired imitators rather than breakers of new ground. Or is it only that, as with a field that has lain fallow for a long time or never been planted to crops, the first crop is often the richest, so with a new field of artistic endeavor the first crop is also the richest and best.
Augustine seems to have known almost everything there was to know about writing an autobiography despite the fact that he had no prior autobiographies to read and compare with his own. He started his Confessions, as is perhaps natural, with his childhood and youth, with his life within the bosom of his family and then as a student in Rome and Milan (he was born in CE 354 at Hippo, in North Africa, near present-day Tunis). He does not conceal the fact that he was a brilliant student of rhetoric, of history, of languages, and of philosophy; after all, we know from many other sources that there never was such a student as this young African, probably never such a brilliant young man in the whole history of Rome.